Back to Other Writings About EcoTopiaIt's said of computers, garbage in - garbage out. The same is true about understanding ourselves. If we rely on false myths about ourselves and our history, no matter how sophisticated our analysis, our conclusions about our society will be as false as the input.
The recent election has highlighted one of these myths. In the last days of the campaign, Perot called President Clinton a draft dodger and said the American people should be ashamed they elected him in 1992. And Dole's criticisms, too, went beyond the political. Though never explicitly stated, there seemed to be the deeply held judgement that Clinton was a free-lovin free-loader who wouldn't fight for his country; that he personally embodied what was wrong with America -- a long-hair, a pot smoker, a hippie with a feminist wife.
Alan Watts, speaking of the most rudimentary myths thirty years ago, articulated the principles of the time:
"It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technological power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distored sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body -- a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature."The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You AreThis feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is a flat contradiction of everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.
The first result of this illusion is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events -- that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies -- and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and on which our whole life depends.
The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe, is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world on which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propogandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propoganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology.
We cannot afford, these days, to be led by those who flunked the lessons of the 60's or to have them misrepresent those values.
Now those who ended the war, marched for civil rights, and insisted that women would not be second class citizens serve on the school boards and city councils. We run the businesses. We work hard. We honor a war resister with the presidency and take Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) for granted. In our culture, we don't drink hard and fight hard. On the contrary, we value the soft spoken, the feeling of being one with the world and protecting it against our own exhuberance.
As this century opened, Woodrow Wilson envisioned a league of nations that would unite the peoples of the earth. As the century closes, changes in technology and trade that he could not have forseen are pushing his vision to fruition and we must promote American values as the standards people all over the earth will enjoy. The march of technology and international alliances are, at best, dignity neutral and democracy neutral. A world of discerning individuals and pleasant communities cannot be taken for granted as the authority of nations recedes in the face of global corporations.
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